#and in fact I love ignoring its implications so I can revisit the characters <3

[eldragon-x]

something very funny about the undertale timeline canonically resetting if you reset the game, meanwhile in stars and time is specifically about siffrin struggling with the idea of moving on after the journey is over but in the qna the creator was like. yeah dont worry about it if you restart the game youre helping a siffrin from another timeline lol

[afishtrap]

This article examines how the Dragon Princess, one of the most celebrated characters in the Lotus Sutra, is represented in the noh drama Ama and the Heike Nōkyō sutra set. By doing so, it debunks the prevailing consensus in understanding the Dragon Princess and her episode in the sutra, and illustrates a hitherto unnoticed intrinsic affinity between medieval Japanese engi stories and Buddhist scriptural narratives.

Ryūichi Abé. "Revisiting the Dragon Princess: Her Role in Medieval Engi Stories and Their Implications in Reading the Lotus Sutra."  Japanese Journal of Religious Studies, Vol. 42, No. 1, Engi: Forging Accounts ofSacred Origins (2015), pp. 27-70.

As Tokuda Kazuo (2013, 11-12) has pointed out, the terms engi and innen were often used interchangeably in medieval Japanese society; furthermore, in the context of proselytizing, innen meant metaphorical and didactic tales such as hiyu, sekkyõ, and setsuwa. Tokuda has gone on to argue that the simplest way to understand the word engi in the medieval Japanese context is to see it as a type of monogatari or storytelling that has something to do with the past origins of things and that is relevant to the worship of Buddhist and indigenous Japanese divinities. Compared to previous research, Tokudas interpretation thus brings the term engi much closer to the sense of nidãna , thereby relating it to narrative categories within the Buddhist scriptural tradition. In fact, in the world of popular medieval religious culture, the word engi had little to do with the philosophical concept of dependent co-origination; instead, it was closely tied to engi and innen accounts from the scriptures. In other words, those who took part in creating and expanding the genre of medieval engi literature exerted themselves as raconteurs, not philosophers.

[...]

What is of particular interest in this article is the element of reigen, miraculous manifestations, as a lens through which the sacred histories of divinities, their home grounds, or temples and shrines that support their worship are revealed. The significance of reigen has already been noted by Sakurai (1975, 459-63). Here I wish to call attention to the fact that reigen episodes frequently involve the death, revival, and resurrection of protagonists, thereby acquainting their audiences with characters' past lives in both human and nonhuman realms. In this respect, two crucial elements highlight the intertextuality of medieval engi stories and scriptural nidãna accounts. First, the narratives traverse the cycle of transmigration by moving back and forth between past and present births and deaths; second, these stories result in the recovery of lost memory or sacred knowledge from the distant past. Thus, a careful reading of scriptural narratives can provide a key to better understand medieval Japanese origin stories, and vice versa.

[...]

The episode featuring the eight-year-old daughter of the Dragon King Sāgara is one of the most celebrated stories in the Lotus Sutra and occurs in the "Devadatta" chapter, which is chapter 12 in Kumārajīvas translation.3 During annual lectures on the eight fascicles of the Lotus Sutra ( hokke hakkõ Heian courtiers celebrated as particularly auspicious the day of the fifth fascicle ( gokan no hi) (Imanari 1994). This is an index of the importance of the "Devadatta" chapter as an illustration of the power of the sutra: although the Taishõ canon places the chapter in the fourth fascicle of the sutra, Heian manuscripts place it at the beginning of the fifth (Nara Kokuritsu Hakubutsukan 1979, 63, 121).

The "Devadatta" chapter consists of two parts. The first is a startling revelation by Śakyamuni Buddha that Devadatta, the Buddha's evil cousin, is in fact the Buddha's good friend and teacher. In a former life, the Buddha had been a  king who sought the highest teaching of the Dharma, which a holy man living in the mountains had mastered in the form of the Lotus Sutra . The holy man promised the king to teach it to him if he would agree to serve as his servant. The king accepted, and for many years he gathered firewood, collected wild fruits and nuts, brought stream water, and prepared meals for the holy man. In the end, the holy man, who was in fact Devadatta in a former life, taught the king the Lotus Sutra's teaching of the ekayãna (One Unifying Vehicle, Ch. yicheng; Jp. ichijõ). The king was reborn, eventually becoming Śakyamuni, who expounds the sutra's teaching on Eagle Peak before his final extinction. In recognition of Devadattas contribution in a former life, the Buddha grants him a prophecy: Devadatta is destined to attain Buddhahood in a future world (t 9-34b-35a).

The episode of the Dragon Princess immediately follows this prophecy. It begins as Manjuśri engages in a conversation with the bodhisattva Accumulated Wisdom, one of the attendants of the Tathāgata Many Treasures, who has come from a cosmic system in the east to visit Śakyamuni Buddha's assembly on Eagle Peak. Manjuśri tells the assembly that during a short stay in the Dragon King's undersea palace, whence he has just returned, he guided innumerable dragon beings into the path of the Mahayana. As soon as he finishes speaking, a countless number of dragon bodhisattvas emerge out of the ocean palace riding on flying lotus seats and gather in the sky over Eagle Peak. When Accumulated Wisdom praises Manjuśns great act of guiding these beings to the bodhisattva path, Manjuśri explains that throughout his stay in the Dragon King's ocean palace, he preached only the Lotus Sutra . Accumulated Wisdom then questions Manjuśri: "This sutra is extremely profound, excellent and subtle. It is the treasure among all sutras. I wonder if you found any being among your students there who diligently applied effort to practice this sutra's teaching and reached Buddhahood swiftly."4 Manjuśrfs answer is crucial for understanding the characterization of the Dragon Princess in the sutra:

"Yes there is one! She is the Dragon King Sāgara's daughter, who is merely eight years old. Yet she is sharp in her capacity of wisdom and observes well how karmie deeds play out in sentient beings' senses. She has mastered dhāraņī ; has excelled in upholding the profoundest of the teaching of all the Buddhas, their secret treasury; has entered into deep meditation; has thoroughly understood the nature of all things. In an instant she gave rise to the mind of enlightenment and reached the stage of non-retrogression. Her eloquence is limitless. She loves sentient beings as if they were her own infant children. She is perfectly endowed with merit. Whatever she thinks in her mind and utters through her mouth is sublime, grand, compassionate, and kind. With her gentle and elegant nature, she succeeded in reaching Bodhi."

[...]

Therefore, in the larger context of the sutra's narrative, the conversation between Manjuśrl and Accumulated Wisdom regarding the Dragon Princess' enlightenment is an exchange between the one who remembers and the other who forgot. Manjuśrl is fully cognizant of events of the distant past -the "engi" in which characters' previous life existences intertwine through the progress of spiritual training. In contrast, Accumulated Wisdom is devoid of such memory: he cannot even begin to imagine the engi -- the story of the Dragon Princess's previous lives -- that must have enabled her to make such great accomplishments in her current life. Grounding himself in insight into practitioners' spiritual progress in their past lives, Manjuśn chooses the Dragon Princess as the most advanced bodhisattva, one who has already attained perfect enlightenment. Accumulated Wisdom's objection derives from his ignorance and should therefore be understood as a rhetorical question. When he asks, "How then is it possible for me to believe that this girl realized the perfect unsurpassed enlightenment of the Buddha in such a short period of time?," he actually confirms that the princess is a very special practitioner who has realized the perfect unsurpassed enlightenment of the Buddha. For that reason, Manjuśn does not even need to answer Accumulated Wisdom. The Dragon Princess suddenly manifests herself before the Buddha. Having prostrated herself in reverence to him, and then having seated herself in a corner of the assembly, she praises him with a gãthã and expresses her resolve to save living beings.

When the Dragon Princess has announced in her verse to the Buddha her vow to engage in salvific acts that benefit living beings, it is Šāriputra who now opposes her. He says that he is not able to accept her enlightenment because he believes that a woman's body is soiled and thus cannot serve as a vessel to advance the Mahayana. Šāriputra supports his point by referring to "five obstructions" (Sk . panca-āvaraņa; Ch. wuzhang ; Jp. goshõ) for women: that they are unable to become Brahmā, Indra, Māra, a cakravartin , or a Buddha.6 The Dragon Princess presents a rejoinder to both Accumulated Wisdom and Šāriputra through not words but action. She offers to the Buddha her legendary jewel whose worth is equal to the entire universe system, and he immediately accepts it. Having seen the Buddha receive her jewel, the Dragon Princess turns to Accumulated Wisdom and Šāriputra and asks whether or not the manner in which the Buddha accepted the jewel was swift. They answer her in unison: "It was very swift." Her act of offering the jewel and the Buddha's acceptance of it create a crucial moment of transition, after which the episode moves into its finale. The significance of this vignette will be further discussed in relationship to the Heike nõkyõ frontispiece in the last section of this article.

[...]

Šāriputra's role in this part of the Lotus Sutra narrative closely resembles the one he plays in the goddess episode of the Vimalakīriti Sutra (t no. 475, 15.547C-548C; Paul 1985, 221-32). In the Vimalakīrti Sutra , Šāriputra, the proud leader of the celibate male clergy, is unable to understand that the Goddess, who had been studying under the householder Vimalakīrti for many years, is a very advanced bodhisattva with a fine grasp of the nature of emptiness as nonduality. In order to guide Šāriputra, the Goddess manifests a vision in which her body and Śariputras body are switched. Having seen himself as female and the Goddess in the form of himself, Śariputra finally frees himself from his androcentric bias, accepts her as his teacher, and is able to enter into the dharma gate of nonduality. At the end of the episode, Vimalakīrti tells Śariputra that the Goddess in her previous lives trained herself under ninety-two million Buddhas. Just like the Dragon Princess, she has already reached the bodhisattva stage of nonretrogression (t 15.548c). Here, too, Śariputra plays the role of a foil to bring to the fore the exceptional spiritual quality of the female protagonist.